The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NON-FICTION • WINNER OF THE WRITERS’ TRUST NON-FICTION PRIZE

“Absolutely spellbinding.” —The New York Times

The environmental true-crime story of a glorious natural wonder, the man who destroyed it, and the fascinating, troubling context in which this act took place. 

FEATURING A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR

On a winter night in 1997, a British Columbia timber scout named Grant Hadwin committed an act of shocking violence in the mythic Queen Charlotte Islands. His victim was legendary: a unique 300-year-old Sitka spruce tree, fifty metres tall and covered with luminous golden needles. In a bizarre environmental protest, Hadwin attacked the tree with a chainsaw. Two days later, it fell, horrifying an entire community. Not only was the golden spruce a scientific marvel and a tourist attraction, it was sacred to the Haida people and beloved by local loggers. Shortly after confessing to the crime, Hadwin disappeared under suspicious circumstances and is missing to this day. As John Vaillant deftly braids together the strands of this thrilling mystery, he brings to life the ancient beauty of the coastal wilderness, the historical collision of Europeans and the Haida, and the harrowing world of logging—the most dangerous land-based job in North America.

JOHN VAILLANT’s acclaimed, award-winning non-fiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were #1 national bestsellers. His debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. He has written for, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Walrus. He lives in Vancouver.

ISBN: 9780676976465
Format: Paperback
Pages: 296
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: January 03, 2006

“In rich, painterly prose, [Vaillant] evokes the lush natural world where the golden spruce took root and thrived, the temperate rain forest of the Pacific Northwest. . . . Vaillant is absolutely spellbinding when conjuring up the world of the golden spruce. His descriptions of the Queen Charlotte Islands, with their misty, murky light and hushed, cathedral-like forests, are haunting, and he does full justice to the noble, towering trees. . . . The chapters on logging, painstakingly researched, make high drama out of the grueling, highly dangerous job of bringing down some of the biggest trees on earth.” —The New York Times

“A page-turner as dramatic as a novel. . . . The story is as majestic as the golden spruce, and we are fortunate to have a writer of Vaillant’ s exceptional skill to tell the tale.” —Vancouver Sun

“A beautifully rendered account of cultural clash and environmental obsession.” —Maclean’s

“In a scrupulously researched narrative worthy of comparison to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Vaillant uses a tragic episode to tell a larger story of the heartbreakingly complex relationship between man and nature.” —Entertainment Weekly (Editor’s Choice)

“Vaillant writes eloquently of West Coast rainforests, quirky characters drawn to a dangerous but lucrative life in logging and Hadwin, who disappears into the BC archipelago, presumed dead. We also learn a great deal about forest ecology and the crime of clear-cutting.” —Canadian Geographic